by guest blogger, Dr. Don Pope
Well, sports fans, it was another exciting weekend of college football. Several traditional big rivalry match-ups were played, the most notable being Michigan versus “The Ohio State University”. The two schools up in Okie-land delayed their annual “Bedlam” rivalry game until this coming weekend so they could focus on the turkey and dressing last week.
The first of the following figures shows our adjusted rankings after week 13.
Note that, as before, Alabama stands out way above the rest, followed by Ohio State and Michigan after their close game, then another Big 10 team, Wisconsin, and the remainder of the top 50 teams.
The second of the figures is a network representation of college football this season, with the dots representing the teams in the various conferences, or independents. The lines represent games played, both within conference and between conferences. The size of the dots reflects their rankings in our system. The large red dot in the Southeastern Conference (SEC) is Alabama, and 3 the large red dots in the Big 10 are Ohio State, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
The sad tale of these figures is the demise of the Big 12. They seem to have forgotten that, after your team scores, you are supposed to put 11 other guys out on the field whose objective is to stop the other team from scoring. Our rankings place many schools from many conferences above any school in the Big 12. Thus, we do not predict the Big 12 teams this year to perform very well in bowl games, assuming that they get invited to any bowl game more significant than the Captain Crunch Breakfast Cereal Bowl.
Stay tuned for next week!